In what follows, I appeal to Charles Babbage’s discussion of the division of mental labor to provide evidence that—at least with respect to the social acquisition, storage, retrieval, and transmission of knowledge—epistemologists have, for a broad range of phenomena of crucial importance to actual knowers in their epistemic practices in everyday life, failed adequately to appreciate the significance of socially distributed cognition. If the discussion here is successful, I will have demonstrated that a particular presumption widely held within the contemporary (...) discussion of the epistemology of testimony—a presumption that I will term the personalist requirement—fails to account for those very practices of knowers that I detail here. I will then conclude by suggesting that an alternate account of testimonial warrant, one that has heretofore been underappreciated, ought to be given more serious consideration—in particular because it is well suited to account for those actual practices of knowers that the personalist requirement leaves unrecognized. (shrink)

Considerations from evolutionary biology lead Michael Ruse, among others, to a naturalistic turn in philosophy. I assess some of the pragmatic and skeptical conclusions concerning ethics, religion, and epistemology that Ruse draws from his evolutionary naturalism. Finally, I argue that there is an essential tension between science and religion which forecloses the possibility of an ultimate reconciliation between the two as they are now understood.

This paper examines the role of ?situations? in John Dewey's philosophy of logic. To do this properly it is necessary to contrast Dewey's conception of experience and mentality with views characteristic of modern epistemology. The primary difference is that, rather than treat experience as peripheral and or external to mental functions (reason, etc.), we should treat experience as a field in and as a part of which thinking takes place. Experience in this broad sense subsumes theory and fact, hypothesis and (...) evidence, reason and observation, thought and perception. Logic in this view is a formal study of the generic features of all possible kinds of experience in this broad (thick, deep, wide, multifaceted) sense. The goal of this paper is to explain what Dewey thinks a situation is in the context of this view of experience, and to argue for the fundamental importance of that idea for logic and philosophy in general. (shrink)

The philosophy of Confucius has often been accused of lacking classical definitions of its core concepts. However, as I shall argue, Confucius systematically used nonclassical definitions—to be precise, operational ones. The notion of operational definition comes from Percy Bridgman’s The Logic of Modern Physics and means that the definiendum is defined by a set of operations that results in determining the meaning of the term in question. In the case of Confucian argumentation, operational definitions are mostly nominal and, in contrast (...) to unambiguous methods of measurement, also context-dependent. This results in there being various yet not mutually inconsistent definitions of one term, and in “paradigmatic examples” playing a crucial role. As I show, this mode of defining things had major implications for the content of Confucius’ thought. In fact, many of its forms could be traced back to other Chinese philosophers, including those of non-Confucian provenance. (shrink)

Researchers misunderstand their role in creating ethical problems when they allow dogmas to purportedly divorce scientists and scientific practices from the values that they embody. Cortina, Edwards, and Powell help us clarify and further develop our position by responding to our critique of, and alternatives to, this misleading separation. In this rebuttal, we explore how the desire to achieve the separation of facts and values is unscientific on the very terms endorsed by its advocates—this separation is refuted by empirical observation. (...) We show that positivists like Cortina and Edwards offer no rigorous theoretical or empirical justifications to substantiate their claims, let alone critique ours. Following Powell, we point to how classical pragmatism understands ‘purpose’ in scientific pursuits while also providing an alternative to the dogmas of positivism and related philosophical positions. In place of dogmatic, unscientific cries about an abstract and therefore always-unobservable ‘reality,’ we invite all organizational scholars to join us in shifting the discussion about quantitative research towards empirically grounded scientific inquiry. This makes the ethics of actual people and their practices central to quantitative research, including the thoughts, discourses, and behaviors of researchers who are always in particular places doing particular things. We propose that quantitative researchers can thus start to think about their research practices as a kind of work, rather than having the status of a kind of dogma. We conclude with some implications that this has for future research and education, including the relevance of research and research methods. (shrink)

This paper argues that it is possible to combine enactivism and ecological psychology in a single post-cognitivist research framework if we highlight the common pragmatist assumptions of both approaches. These pragmatist assumptions or starting points are shared by ecological psychology and the enactive approach independently of being historically related to pragmatism, and they are based on the idea of organic coordination, which states that the evolution and development of the cognitive abilities of an organism are explained by appealing to the (...) history of interactions of that organism with its environment. It is argued that the idea of behavioral or organic coordination within the enactive approach gives rise to the sensorimotor abilities of the organism, while the ecological approach emphasizes the coordination at a higher-level between organism and environment through the agent’s exploratory behavior for perceiving affordances. As such, these two different processes of organic coordination can be integrated in a post-cognitivist research framework, which will be based on two levels of analysis: the subpersonal one and the personal one. If this proposal is on the right track, this may be a promising first step for offering a systematized and consistent post-cognitivist approach to cognition that retain the full potential of both enactivism and ecological psychology. (shrink)

Over the past three decades, cognitive science has been making a turn towards pragmatism. Here we outline steps towards completing this turn. As a handful of cognitive scientists and philosophers have been arguing more recently, the insights of William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead are not only being re-discovered, they are also proving rather prescient in light of growing research. The new field of neuropragmatism aims to take these insights seriously and further into new directions for both pragmatism (...) and cognitive science. In this manifesto, a brief history of the relationship between classical pragmatism and the sciences of life and mind is offered as a background for twelve proposed theses of neuropragmatism. These theses serve as general guidelines for further philosophical and scientific research. To illustrate the possibilities and consequences of this neuropragmatic framework, neuropragmatist views on traditional questions of philosophy of mind, such as the mind-body relationship, are situated among other leading philosophical perspectives, like enactive, embodied, and embedded theories of cognition and mentation. Such views, however, when taken from a neuropragmatist perspecitve, have significant consequences for the philosophical project of reconciliation be- tween what Wilfrid Sellars called the scientific and manifest images of humanity. The difference in conceptions of experience and subesequently science are crucial for understanding the difference between Sellarsian neurophilosophy and neuropragmatism, as well as how to reach rapprochement between the sciences and the humanities. (shrink)

The species category is defined as thesmallest historical individual within which there is a parental pattern of ancestry and descent. The use of historical individual in this definition is consistent with the prevailing notion that speciesper se are not involved in processes — they are effects, not effectors. Reproductive isolation distinguishes biparental historical species from their parts, and it provides a basis for understanding the nature of the evidence used to discover historical individuals.

The contemporary sociology of morality is a form of descriptive ethics that shrinks away from any sort of prescriptive ethics. Building on the moral philosophies of John Dewey, and also of Alasdair MacIntyre and Paul Ricoeur, and in dialogue with recent work by Stefan Bargheer, this article proposes a more ambitious program of critical social ethics that connects concerns with character and the common good but tempers them with attention to alienation and oppression.

There is a surge of attempts to draw out the epistemological consequences of views according to which cognition is deeply embedded, embodied and/or extended. The principal machinery used for doing so is that of analytic epistemology. Here I argue that Dewey's pragmatic epistemology may be better fit to the task. I start by pointing out the profound similarities between Dewey's view on cognition and that emerging from literature of more recent date. Crucially, the benefit of looking at Dewey is that (...) Dewey, unlike contemporary writers, also devises a corresponding epistemology. I then identify two senses in which contemporary analytic epistemology conflicts with e-cog—concluding from that the superiority of the Deweyian framework, at least as it concerns accommodating e-cog. (shrink)

The Darwinian economic theory that Thorstein Veblen proposed and refined while he served as a professor of Political Economy at the University of Chicago from 1891 to 1906 should be assessed in the context of the community of Darwinian scientists and social scientists with whom Veblen worked and lived at Chicago. It is important to identify Veblen as a member of this broad community of Darwinian-inclined philosophers, physiologists, geologists, astronomers, and biologists at Chicago because Veblen’s involvement with this circle suggests (...) that the possible sources of his engagement with Darwinism extend beyond the pragmatists and Continental socialists to whom scholars have typically ascribed Veblen’s Darwinian roots. Additionally, that an extensive community continued to use Darwinian evolutionary theory to construct new models of scientific and social scientific analysis at the turn of the twentieth century, a period during which Darwinism was purportedly in decline, suggests that the “eclipse of Darwinism” narrative has been overstated in literature about Darwinism’s intellectual arc. (shrink)

The notion of “emergence” has recently received renewed attention in research fields ranging from biology to cognitive sciences and philosophy of mind. Today’s concept of “emergence” incorporates a long history of philosophical debates and reflections that can be traced back to James and John Stuart Mill and nineteenth-century associationist philosophy. This tradition reached its theoretical maturity in the early twentieth century with so-called classical British emergentism, which gained the attention of pragmatist philosophers from the beginning. In the current literature exploring (...) the relationship between Pragmatism and the emergentist tradition, almost nothing is said about the interesting case of Chauncey Wright (1830-1875), a follower of J. S. Mill and A. Bain, and a crucial figure for the origins of pragmatist philosophy. After a brief historical introduction about the history of the notion of “emergence” and its relationship to classical Pragmatism, the paper aims to examine Wright’s philosophy in relation, on one hand, to the pragmatist tradition and, on the other hand, to the problem of emergence. In the wake of Wright’s original interpretation of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, the article focuses on the key notions of “novelty” and “new uses,” through which Wright developed an “emergentist” philosophy that was well ahead of its time and attracted the interest of Samuel Alexander, one of the major philosophers of classical British emergentism. In the second part, the paper analyzes Wright’s reflections about the origin of human self-consciousness as a paradigmatic case of authentic evolutionary novelty. In the final part, the article focuses on the kind of pragmatic realism sketched out by Wright and summarizes the most important aspects to have emerged during the scholarly debate on the topic. (shrink)

This paper proposes an alternative perspective on the question of the relationship between German Idealism and American Pragmatism through attention to the philosophy of Josiah Royce. Despite being seen as a Hegelian, Royce declared himself a pragmatist. However, he also called his position Absolute Voluntarism. This paper suggests that the real issue between Idealism and Pragmatism is Intellectualism vs. Voluntarism. This distinction both parallels and cuts across the traditions of German Idealism and American Pragmatism, and promises to open up a (...) view broader than the traditional accounts of the qualified appreciation of Hegel seen in Peirce and Dewey, or the outright antipathy of James. With Peirce, we see that his continual call for Royce to study logic includes, or complements, his criticisms that Royce neglects Secondness. Regarding James, we see his influence on Royce is mediated also in their mutual study of Wundt’s voluntaristic psychology, which has its own roots in the pre-Kantian German Idealism of Leibniz. As for Dewey, he acknowledges Royce’s voluntarism, but rejects Royce’s claim that his Absolute Pragmatism/Voluntarism is pragmatism at all. Nonetheless, even if Royce failed to fuse his idealism and pragmatism, the very effort suggests he saw them as distinct enough to need fusion. (shrink)

In this essay, I respond to the critical remarks of Louise Barrett, Amanda Corris and Anthony Chemero, and Daniel Hutto on my book Enactivist Interventions. In doing so, I consider whether behaviorism can make a contribution to enactivist theory, whether synergies are the same as dynamical gestalts, and whether the brain can add anything to mathematical reasoning.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman and John Dewey were both pragmatists who recognized the need to restructure the environment to bring about social progress. Gilman was even more of a pragmatist than Dewey, however, because she addressed problems he did not identify-much less confront. Her philosophy is in accord with the spirit of Dewey's work but in important ways, it is more consistent, more comprehensive and more radical than his instrumentalism.

In this paper I argue that, from a pragmatist point of view, to know the past means to anticipate it. Accordingly, historical inquiry is directed towards the future, namely the future of the past as known. I develop this argument in three steps: (I.) Starting with A. O. Lovejoy’s criticism of Dewey’s anticipatory theory of knowledge I defend the basic claim that all knowledge, including knowledge of the past, is anticipatory (i.e. directed at future consequences). Lovejoy’s criticism shows that Dewey’s (...) statements invite misunderstandings, which have to be removed. (II.) I then turn to C. I. Lewis’ enhanced outline of a pragmatist theory of knowledge. Lewis provides epistemological arguments regarding the structural features of knowledge of the past and argues knowledge that is gained by the past’s present effects. (III.) Finally, I turn to a notable essay by E. Wind in which he stresses the intrusive and future-oriented character of historical inquiry: Documents are used as instruments for intruding into the past, asking how the past will be understood in the light of new or reconsidered evidence. This process involves anticipating the effects that a different past will have on those affected by the history in question. (shrink)

The compatibility of scientific realism and evolutionary epistemology is a controversial issue in contemporary philosophy of science. Scientific realism is the view that scientific theories aim to describe the true nature of reality, while evolutionary epistemology is the view that scientific knowledge is the product of natural selection and adaptation. Some philosophers argue that evolutionary epistemology undermines the epistemic status of scientific theories and thus poses a serious challenge to scientific realism. This paper examines this problem and explores whether scientific (...) realism can be reconciled with evolutionary epistemology. The paper argues that critical rationalism (CR), a philosophical approach that rejects justificationism and emphasizes the role of criticism, rationality, and objectivity in science, can provide a viable framework for integrating scientific realism and evolutionary epistemology. The paper shows that by adopting a non-justificationist fallibilist stance toward scientific theories, CR can reconcile the realist and the evolutionary views on scientific knowledge. (shrink)

Research on folk epistemology usually takes place within one of two different paradigms. The first is centered on epistemic theories or, in other words, the way people think about knowledge. The second is centered on epistemic intuitions, that is, the way people intuitively distinguish knowledge from belief. In this paper, we argue that insufficient attention has been paid to the connection between the two paradigms, as well as to the mechanisms that underlie the use of both epistemic intuitions and theories. (...) We contend that research on folk epistemology must examine the use of both intuitions and theories in the pragmatic context of the game of giving and asking for reasons and, more generally, understand how these practices take place within the broader context of normative social cognition. (shrink)

En este artículo analizaré algunos puntos de convergencia entre la filosofía transhumanista y la crítica filosófica contemporánea al antropocentrismo. Para ello distinguiré entre un tipo de programa normativo fuerte y uno débil en el transhumanismo. El argumento central reside en que la normatividad fuerte en el discurso transhumanista, al suponer que es posible seleccionar exclusivamente las características “propiamente humanas” para ser conservadas en el estadio post-humano, se basa en una concepción pre-darwiniana de la especie humana, lo cual posee implicancias tanto (...) epistemológicas como éticas. (shrink)

Enactive theory seems to be reaching a critical juncture in its evolution, as it expands beyond cognitive science to include a project that Shaun Gallagher has called “new naturalism”: a “phenomenologized” reconstruction of nature, directed by a distinctive view of experience that is itself a product of “naturalized phenomenology.” This article aims to contribute to conversations about how to move forward with this project by highlighting important parallels between the trajectory of enactive theory and the early history of pragmatism. Pragmatism (...) was first developed by Peirce, James, and Dewey out of a distinctive view of experience that strongly resembles that of enactive theory. Then, during the first third of the twentieth century, pragmatism evolved into a philosophy of nature and played a leading role in a reconstructive project much like the “new naturalism” proposed by Gallagher and others. Around midcentury, however, this project was largely abandoned as philosophers turned to problems of more limited scope. This history raises crucial questions for proponents of enactive “new naturalism”: Why did the pragmatist version of this project fail to achieve its aims? And how will it be different this time? (shrink)

In recent pragmatist-leaning philosophy and ethics, the Jamesian notion of the cries of the wounded has reemerged as a method of evoking moral progress. Philosophers like Philip Kitcher have argued that a surefooted approach to the complaints of those harmed by given social moral arrangements may lead to an improvement of moral thought, practices and institutions. Yet, at the same time, it has been acknowledged that this comprises a most evident problem: many wounded stakeholders do not cry out about their (...) sorrow, not at last because they may not be capable of doing so. In this paper, we aim at providing a more detailed account on the communicative range of social unrest, capable of overcoming the reductive vision of some possibly harmed as being silent. Some moral philosophers have highlighted the role of the arts and the humanities in the fostering of a more empathetic imagination. With the aid of continental aesthetics (T. W. Adorno and M. Beistegui), we acknowledge the value of artistic imagination as a communicative faculty extending beyond the limits of discursive reason through non-conceptual tools. Taking it into account in moral inquiry effectively expands and provides a more detailed account on the wounded that are apparently silent, as it includes a variety of forms of communication as moral standpoints and conversational apostrophes. This finally leads us to reread James’ take on the notion of the cries of the wounded, to emphasize the necessity to understand it as a fruitful stance about inclusive moral inquiry exceeding the limits of a conceptual-discursive focus. (shrink)